Rex Muston of Iowa is our host today for the 4th day of the March Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. He inspires us to use our kitchen junk drawer to inspire poetry. You can read his full prompt here.
A kitchen junk drawer is second only as frightening to me as forgetting a piece of clothing and showing up at work for everyone to see all truth. It’s downright scary except for the drawer I did clean out last weekend. I still have one to go, and it’s the worst one. An invitation to explore those quirky drawer corners is fantastic! I love that even in the oddities, the junk, there are revelations of life and memories.
Unbanded
One junk drawer is empty ~the middle one~ but the one on the edge is chock-full of random bits and pieces
a years’ supply of 9V batteries for the smoke alarms we change often because Boo Radley shivers at the smell of toaster heat and smoke alarm chirps
plus the goat ball banding tool and bright orange bands as if the whole horrid thing needed a screaming fluorescent proclamation across the farm
and a vintage unfiltered cigarette- sized box of Happy Family ceramic pigs from England
a mama and twin piglets but no daddy there was never even a space for his unbanded self
now from the Funny Farm kitchen windowsill Mama smiles with a sparkle-eye bats her eyelashes and thinks….
My sister-in-law canning blueberries in a water bath
Sunday morning began early. Like 5 a.m. early.
Two kitchens on the Johnson Funny Farm were tackling a mission to prepare two foods each and swap some goods, like an old-fashioned cookie swap – – only different. We started with fruits ~ vegetables will come later.
Bethany’s blueberries
My sister-in-law and I both canned cinnamon spiced apples and she canned apple butter using apples we’d purchased at Jaemor Farms in Alto, Georgia on her birthday outing on Saturday after our stroll through Gibbs Gardens. She also canned blueberries. I canned peach marmalade using peaches also purchased at Jaemor Farms and also canned fig marmalade. I would have ordinarily used peaches from Gregg Farms, our local orchard two miles from our home, but over 90 percent of Georgia’s peach crop was lost this year due to weather, and Gregg’s lost every one of their peaches.
The figs, though, were grown forty feet from our house on a tree I planted in 2009, purchased for $3.00 on a clearance rack at Home Depot. We have loved on this tree for a decade and a half. Some years we’ve made fig preserves, but other years we’ve let the black swallowtails and monarchs feast on the fermenting figs without the threat of our picking. One year, a good friend came to pick some for a prized fig cake she was baking from the Barefoot Contessa cookbook, and she brought us one of her cakes as well. The memories of figs are alive and well from this tree and from the trees of my mother and grandmothers as we made strawberry figs together with my children for so many years.
And Jesus himself liked figs. (21st Chapter of Matthew)
Citrus puree for preservation of marmalade
So our day of canning started with peeling, slicing, chopping, blending, and dicing that led to boiling, stirring, simmering, scooping, sealing, cooling, and labeling.
We made a jar run to purchase some jars with sealing lids and rings, pectin, and other ingredients.
My sister-in-law Bethany’s apple butter
My peach marmalade
Fig marmalade
Canning was a great way to relax and fill our homes with the aromas of the love language of cooking, but I’m still trying my best to make the math work. I remained in the black on the figs I grew if I didn’t factor in the cost of the jars and lids (repeated jar uses would lessen that cost each time). With the cost of the peaches, I went into the red compared to what was on the shelf at Jaemor, already canned. Ounce for ounce, I paid more to do the canning – and I didn’t count the time or the electricity, or the extra air conditioning in the already hot kitchen. I would need to grow my own peaches or buy the bruised or overripe fruits and can them that day to make the cost analysis work compared to what I could buy already in jars canned by a professional who is far more skilled than I am. But I realize it is all about the fun and the preservation of foods for those winter storms when we need to hunker down and stay home by the fire and recall the warmth of summer fruits and memories in the kitchen to soothe our souls.
(I still think free-range chickens are the best investment for self-sustaining farm, if we could keep the hawks away).
If you have an amazing recipe for canning – or tips to keep it more affordable – please share in the comments below. I’d love some great instant pot and crock pot canning recipes. I don’t think I’m a good candidate for a pressure cooker. I might really do some damage with that.
I recently asked Dad to text me some of the recipes for foods I remember making with my mother when I was younger. He sent me several snapshots of recipes, and even a photo of a lock of my childhood hair that my mother had tucked away in the recipe box in a blue envelope.
After work on Thursday, I swung by our local grocery store on the way home from work to pick up some jars for canning. I’ve been meaning to make some fig preserves before the figs are all dried up. Right now, the blue swallowtails are feasting on the fermented figs like it’s some kind of heavenly all-you-can-eat buffet, and I needed to pick the last of the fig harvest for this year for some recipes. I settled on Fig Marmalade.
I picked the figs from my towering fig tree that I purchased for $3.00 from a scratch-and-dent clearance cart on the side of the plant section in Home Depot over a decade ago.
I sterilized some jelly jars and lids by boiling them while I chopped the figs, simmered the lemons, grated the orange rind, and squeezed the juice.
For this recipe, I used pure cane sugar instead of regular granulated sugar. I boiled it, then simmered on low for about an hour and a half until it got thick (the recipe says 30 minutes, but I wanted mine thicker). Then, I scooped it into canning jars with seals on the lids and labeled the tops.
Since we usually have breakfast for supper a couple of times a week, we consume a lot of jelly with our toast. I’ve also used it to put on brie with crackers. I used one of my mother’s old measuring cups that we’d used together as I made the marmalade (it has a chip in one place that feels a lot like an age wrinkle), so it has her hand in it, too. This will surely bring back all the memories and feels of my childhood fig marmalade.
Common Threads 